They're pissed as hell. Every story is filled with comments that say they'll boycott. But this is Microsoft working behind the scenes to stamp out a respected site for daring to crap on their tyranny over open source and whatnot. Can't have that.

Zel:Princess Ryans Knickers: Beta design way easier on the eyes than the old one.

Unless you wanted to read a lot of text, then all that whitespace is a detriment. I bought big monitors so I could read a lot of text, not so marketing jerks can fill it with ads.

Slashdot links have digressed to three major genres: "Everyone should go into Computer Science, except women!" Click bait, "No one should ever pay for software, as an over paid developer I see no downsides to this cunning plan!" type keyboard hippieism or press releases for products and unsustainable SanFran start-ups thinly veiled as news.

BumpInTheNight:Zel: Princess Ryans Knickers: Beta design way easier on the eyes than the old one.

Unless you wanted to read a lot of text, then all that whitespace is a detriment. I bought big monitors so I could read a lot of text, not so marketing jerks can fill it with ads.

Slashdot links have digressed to three major genres: "Everyone should go into Computer Science, except women!" Click bait, "No one should ever pay for software, as an over paid developer I see no downsides to this cunning plan!" type keyboard hippieism or press releases for products and unsustainable SanFran start-ups thinly veiled as news.

So, basically Fark but stupider? At least fark has flavors of crap with nuts, or corn, or sometimes pretty color!

BumpInTheNight:Zel: Princess Ryans Knickers: Beta design way easier on the eyes than the old one.

Unless you wanted to read a lot of text, then all that whitespace is a detriment. I bought big monitors so I could read a lot of text, not so marketing jerks can fill it with ads.

Slashdot links have digressed to three major genres: "Everyone should go into Computer Science, except women!" Click bait, "No one should ever pay for software, as an over paid developer I see no downsides to this cunning plan!" type keyboard hippieism or press releases for products and unsustainable SanFran start-ups thinly veiled as news.

Don't forget about the 9,132 open-source project announcements per day, followed the next day by 9,133 project abandonment announcements.

Zel:Princess Ryans Knickers: Beta design way easier on the eyes than the old one.

Unless you wanted to read a lot of text, then all that whitespace is a detriment. I bought big monitors so I could read a lot of text, not so marketing jerks can fill it with ads.

Fark's present design burns about 2" of space on the right column, but the slashdot beta sidebar is almost the entire width of the comments. When comments are nested, the blank sidebar is wider than the comments. Two trivial things that would enhance readability would be to rein in the really wide inter-line spacing and ditch the grey-on-grey color scheme for a more legible black-on-white.

To me, it looks like a mishmash of the trendy UX antipatterns that look great as Photoshop mockups, but are actually detriments to readability: the use of floating bars on the top that break the use of PageUp/PageDown/spacebar for scrolling, the infinite scroll antipattern that makes it difficult to load all comments in a long thread. Replacement of accurate timestamps with vague approximations so it's impossible to tell who's original and who's plagiarizing, etc. Grey-on-grey.

They seem to be making the same mistake Windows 8 (or Digg v4) made: a UX revamp is widely protested by the userbase for months, most feedback is ignored, and despite everyone being aware of the predictable result, nobody in house is willing to admit that the emperor has no clothes. Office politics has its own momentum, and so the owners drive it off the cliff anyways.

kroonermanblack:BumpInTheNight: Zel: Princess Ryans Knickers: Beta design way easier on the eyes than the old one.

Unless you wanted to read a lot of text, then all that whitespace is a detriment. I bought big monitors so I could read a lot of text, not so marketing jerks can fill it with ads.

Slashdot links have digressed to three major genres: "Everyone should go into Computer Science, except women!" Click bait, "No one should ever pay for software, as an over paid developer I see no downsides to this cunning plan!" type keyboard hippieism or press releases for products and unsustainable SanFran start-ups thinly veiled as news.

So, basically Fark but stupider? At least fark has flavors of crap with nuts, or corn, or sometimes pretty color!

I must say I am always in the "If it ain't broken, don't fix it" group. Now, if it's actually broken, or what you are doing is clearly superior, that's different. But change for change's sake usually results in an inferior product.

Slashcode's a farking mess, or at least it produces a UI that's a farking mess. However.

The whole farking point of Slashdot is the discussions, and the whole discussion model is based on threading, distributed moderation, and moderation-based display/collapse/hiding of posts.

Beta completely broke the display/collapse/hide model. You can set one threshold; comments scored above that threshold show in their entirety, and comments scored below it are hidden completely.

I have my own feelings about the look of the old site vs. the beta. But without the basic functionality of hiding, collapsing, and displaying based on dual thresholds, beta Just. Doesn't. Work.

I was happy to see the comment section reduced to a seething cauldron of Beta-hate, because the folks running the site gave every impression of ignoring all the feedback they'd gotten over months of lower-intensity beta-testing. This seems to have gotten their attention.

I'd like to see people going back to actual discussion now, but it looks like people aren't willing to let go. Whatever. It's not like I lived there anyhow.

Geotpf:I must say I am always in the "If it ain't broken, don't fix it" group. Now, if it's actually broken, or what you are doing is clearly superior, that's different. But change for change's sake usually results in an inferior product.

Slashdot's current interface works pretty well. It's fairly bright with all that white going on, but it's also clean without looking like an advertising mockup for Web 2.0, which the new beta looks like.

I guess I'm not really worried about the redesign of site I gave up on a time long ago. It's been a while since /. has been anything but a biatch fest (and I speaking as someone who used to love /. ). It's rare that you see a thread there that doesn't rapidly devolve into name calling. It's like the politics tab, but worse.

bhcompy:Slashdot's current interface works pretty well. It's fairly bright with all that white going on, but it's also clean without looking like an advertising mockup for Web 2.0, which the new beta looks like.

And, of course, it's not the ads themselves that cause the problems. It's when maximizing the amount of time looking at ads becomes the only priority in site design. All you've got left to protest with is your presence.

(So far only one site has been unobtrusive enough in this regard for me to feel justified in turning off adblock plus. Remember the good google ads?)

Guadior42:styckx: So they hate it because it's easy on the eyes and comments section is not a clusterfark?

The comments section is the only good thing about the old design. Yeah, it's ugly. But the threaded conversations, the moderation and karma system work really well.

//.//that was only one slashie.////.

You should try nested view. It's had an issue for about 15 years now that if a first level comment had enough replies and sub-replies, etc, that comment would appear at the top of the next two or three pages.

Geotpf:I must say I am always in the "If it ain't broken, don't fix it" group. Now, if it's actually broken, or what you are doing is clearly superior, that's different. But change for change's sake usually results in an inferior product.

I think the important part is "clearly superior" when making such major changes. Often you can compare a couple of designs and find one is slightly better than the other overall (individual changes can be much better/much worse, but generally there are negatives and positives between the two, so overall it tends to usually be less clear cut).

If creating a new site/app then pick the best one. With something existing the presumption should always be to stay the same as you have potentially years (or decades) of user experience and knowledge of how to use the app/site you are discarding when you change things, so until you can get something that is clearly better for the vast majority of users you should hold back.

Making small incremental changes/improvements should generally be the preferred route, although there are usually limits of how far that can go (and in some cases there are commercial considerations where you want to sell the improvements and so incremental changes would undercut future sales).

Nemo's Brother:kroonermanblack: BumpInTheNight: Zel: Princess Ryans Knickers: Beta design way easier on the eyes than the old one.

Unless you wanted to read a lot of text, then all that whitespace is a detriment. I bought big monitors so I could read a lot of text, not so marketing jerks can fill it with ads.

Slashdot links have digressed to three major genres: "Everyone should go into Computer Science, except women!" Click bait, "No one should ever pay for software, as an over paid developer I see no downsides to this cunning plan!" type keyboard hippieism or press releases for products and unsustainable SanFran start-ups thinly veiled as news.

So, basically Fark but stupider? At least fark has flavors of crap with nuts, or corn, or sometimes pretty color!

I've got to say that the initial post on this topic perpetuates one of the paradigms that is sticking in the craws of Slashdot users. We are not an audience. We might be users, we might be members, we most certainly are contributors. But we are not an audience.

If you persist in thinking of us that way, then you're going to get it wrong. You serve an audience differently than you serve contributing members of a community. Most of the complaints hinge on that difference.

If we were an audience, we'd be coming here for the articles. Most of the complaints are about the comment system, how difficult it is to follow a conversation, how difficult it is leave a comment, etc. I come here, most of us come here, to read what my/our fellow slashdotters have to say. The value here is the community, and the most important contributors are other members, not the site or the editors.

If you don't get that straight, then you aren't going to "get" why we're upset, so there's no chance that you'll deliver us something that we can live with. And that community is going to vanish, leaving you with nothing of value.You can take suggestions and maybe reduce the implosion, but unless you understand *why* we're upset, you're going to be heading in fundamentally the wrong direction.

Which is funny, because I stopped reading Slashdot when I got tired of the "community." I'm a human being, in the business of IT, not some basement dwelling linux zealot.

If slashdot is retooled into a IT news aggregator, instead of a whiny nerd circlejerk, I might just stop by again.

xria:Geotpf: I must say I am always in the "If it ain't broken, don't fix it" group. Now, if it's actually broken, or what you are doing is clearly superior, that's different. But change for change's sake usually results in an inferior product.

I think the important part is "clearly superior" when making such major changes. Often you can compare a couple of designs and find one is slightly better than the other overall (individual changes can be much better/much worse, but generally there are negatives and positives between the two, so overall it tends to usually be less clear cut).

If creating a new site/app then pick the best one. With something existing the presumption should always be to stay the same as you have potentially years (or decades) of user experience and knowledge of how to use the app/site you are discarding when you change things, so until you can get something that is clearly better for the vast majority of users you should hold back.

Making small incremental changes/improvements should generally be the preferred route, although there are usually limits of how far that can go (and in some cases there are commercial considerations where you want to sell the improvements and so incremental changes would undercut future sales).

Yup. If a total redesign (of anything; this applies to much more than just websites) is only "slightly better"-don't bother.

In any case, it seems clear that the version they were testing at /. was not even "slightly better" but instead was "totally broken".

I had forgotten all about slashdot. I used to go there all the time when I first started screwing around with Linux but then I realized I never really wanted to install Linux or FreeBSD on a toaster or blender, I kind of never went back.

MadMonk:I had forgotten all about slashdot. I used to go there all the time when I first started screwing around with Linux but then I realized I never really wanted to install Linux or FreeBSD on a toaster or blender, I kind of never went back.